Tom Toner: Msgr Tom Toner, the senior Down and
Connor figure who has died after a long illness, was probably typical in
his struggle to be an effective parish priest through continual civil
trauma.He also did his best to reach beyond his community, seizing on the hopes raised by the IRA’s 1994 ceasefire to twin St Peter’s in the Lower Falls with St Anne’s Church of Ireland cathedral in the city centre for shared musical and cultural events.
He was a friendly man, proper and conservative and became a priest in pre-Troubles, socially diverse west Belfast. Unusually, he was made parish priest in the parish of his birth, St Agnes, his familiarity with the district clearly seen as equipping him to counter emergent republicanism.
Some remember him mustering women from the church to paint out the “Venceremos sisters” Provo slogan of would-be international solidarity on a gable wall. The Toner approach pleased some older parishioners but failed with those who saw no conflict between supporting the IRA and their religious practice.
Toner was proud of his partnership with St Anne’s Dean John Shearer and knew how divided the communities were.
He told a rueful tale of driving to his first ecumenical meeting across the Lagan on a summer evening, realising that he was crossing the King’s Bridge on his way east and would come back across the Governor’s Bridge – but nowhere on his journey, nor in the wider city, did street names and signage reflect his own community.
He put this thought to the meeting.
“They didn’t know what I was talking about.”
His eloquence was manifest at many funerals.
In April 1987 he said of the IRA’s killing of 30-year-old Charlie McIlmurray, found shot in the head after being held in a house near Dundalk, that “if he had been abducted by the security forces, left dead with a hood over his head and his hands bound, there would have been demands for intervention by the cardinal and howls for dramatic action by Bishop Daly”.
However, the RUC had also abused him by using him as an informant, he pointed out. “Charlie McIlmurray was the small man in-between.”
A year later he was criticised for condemning as murder the SAS killings in Gibraltar of three IRA members, would-be bombers but unarmed, which set off a murderous spiral that cast the Catholics of west Belfast as pitiless and brutalised.
Under the headline “Turbulent priests – Ireland’s pulpits of faith and fury”, the Guardian reported Toner speaking at the funeral of two of the Gibraltar dead of “anger at the lies that had been told, people in high places gloating over these murders”.
But the report’s conclusion that priests were useful conduits between their people and British officialdom might have been describing the articulate Toner in particular, as much at ease in surroundings far from west Belfast as in St Agnes’s GAA club on the Glen Road, which he helped form, aged 15. He was a lifelong hurling fan and followed the club’s fortunes until his last illness.
Deft though he was, Toner made less connection with IRA prisoners than the less polished Denis Faul, one of his fellow chaplains in the H Blocks of the Maze during the 1981 hunger strikes.
It was “the Menace”, as IRA prisoners called Faul, who barrelled between the jail, families of the hunger-strikers and media, in the effort that at last helped end the protest.
Like other less turbulent priests Toner tried to comfort relatives and remained haunted by the strike deaths.
A stalwart of St Agnes’s club remembers him for spiritual leadership in the aftermath of Gibraltar, in March 1988, soon after the two corporals who accidentally drove into a west Belfast republican funeral were dragged from their car and shot dead.
“Tom was delivering the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday about a week later. At the end he told the congregation that he was walking to Penny Lane to say a decade of the Rosary on the spot where the soldiers had been killed. He asked if anyone was willing to join him, while acknowledging that some might not want to.
“By my memory 100 per cent, man, woman and child, followed him out of the church and walked the short distance to the spot.”
In the priestly roll call of the Troubles, Toner struck fewer ringing tones than Faul, more rounded ones than Cardinal Cahal Daly.
But a near-neighbour a decade younger suspected that he “always felt a sense of failure. A stranger in the parish he grew up in, he was unable to change it back, appalled at lawlessness and godlessness beyond his understanding. Then he was moved to St Peter’s, Divis Flats. Even worse.”
He is survived by his brother John, nieces and nephews.
Tom Toner: Born September 3rd 1936, Died November 12th, 2012